Mick Hartley

The forgotten Uighurs. From the Telegraph:

China is to triple the number of facilities it uses to forcibly harvest the organs of detained Uyghur people, it has been claimed.

Experts have raised the alarm after it emerged that the Xinjiang Health Commission, a branch of China’s national health authority, plans to open six new medical centres by 2030, bringing the total in the region to nine.

The expansion has heightened concerns over China’s treatment of Uyghur people, against whom the government already stands accused of genocide.

Beijing has also been accused of forcibly harvesting the organs of prisoners from minority groups and, in some cases, selling them to wealthy recipients willing to pay the equivalent of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

An international tribunal, conducted in the UK in 2019, found that as many as 100,000 organ transplants had been carried out in China annually – nearly three times the number that its government reported to the international register.

Sayragul Sauytbay, a Kazakh doctor who was previously detained in Xinjiang, has spoken publicly about camp-wide “health checks” where detainees had their blood tested and, depending on their results, were then sorted into groups.

She began to notice that those who were given a pink check mark would soon disappear, concluding it was because of “organ harvesting”.

While the decision to build the new facilities was made in December last year, the plans have only recently been made public by End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an Australia-based human rights charity.

The 2019 tribunal determined that the organs of marginalised detainees in China were being forcefully harvested, sometimes when the patients were still alive, to serve a transplant trade worth over $1 billion (£733 million).

While China has a voluntary organ donation scheme, Wendy Rogers, the chairman of ETAC’s advisory board, told The Telegraph that in many cases they were harvested forcefully, including from otherwise healthy prisoners against their will and who are slowly killed as their organs are removed.

Earlier this year, it was estimated that at least half a million Uyghurs were in prisons or detention centres. They have also faced decades of persecution by the Chinese government, including mass detention and forced sterilisation.

Given the history of abuse against the Uyghurs, of whom there are 10 million in Xinjiang, there is concern that the new transplant facilities will result in more forced organ harvesting among the population.

The imprisoned Uighurs, obviously, make an ideal captive source for organ harvesting. It's a huge market, and the wealthy buyers will pay more for organs from healthy donors – or rather, healthy bodies. Members of the persecuted Falun Gong religious sect, who didn't smoke or drink, used to be favoured, but the abstemious Muslim Uighurs make a fine replacement.

“The concept of informed, voluntary consent is meaningless in Xinjiang’s carceral environment,” said David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who has previously investigated organ harvesting in China.

“Given the systemic repression, any claim that donations are voluntary should be treated with the utmost scepticism.”

Even before the new facilities were announced, Xinjiang was known as a hub for organ transplants.

In the province’s capital Urumqi, its airport has green arrows on the ground – known as “Green Passage” lanes – to fast-track the transit of those transporting organs.

A real dystopian nightmare, then – but of absolutely no interest to the Gaza-obsessed protestors on the streets every day.